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YouTuber Andrew Callaghan has pulled back the curtain on his infamous encounter with Clavicular, in which the high-profile ‘looksmaxxer’ stormed off set after being asked a handful of pretty basic questions.
“I just don’t like the guy. He was a f***ing a**hole man. Like, straight up. He was so negative and I was trying to give him the time of day. I wasn’t setting him up for any kind of ‘gotcha’ moment,” Callaghan told his fellow documentarian Louis Theroux, in a new episode of Theroux’s eponymous podcast.
For the uninitiated, Callaghan is a popular YouTuber who straddles the worlds of hard news, documentary and comedy. His popular series Channel 5 and All Gas No Brakes have earned him a reputation as a storyteller who finds finds the humanity in every story – even when his subjects are perhaps not the most sympathetic characters. But his willingness to platform people such as InfoWars founder Alex Jones means he’s never far from the centre of controversy.
Callaghan told Theroux that he doesn’t seek out controversy, he just looks for compelling stories and characters. That stance, along with his embedded coverage of the Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis in 2020, have gained him a cult following online and around the world.
“I just found myself in a room with doing weights, drinking Tito’s vodka out of the bottle at 11AM, shirtless, yelling ‘1776!’ and I was like: ‘How can I not include this in the movie?’”
The wide ranging interview with Theroux touched on a number of topics, including a threatened $1 billion lawsuit from Melania Trump, and the sexual misconduct allegations that led to his 2022 online cancellation. We’ve detailed the most notable revelations from the conversation below
Andrew Callaghan Explains the Clavicular ‘Looksmaxxing’ Interview
In March this year, Callaghan made headlines when Clavicular, the online king of ‘looksmaxxing‘ stormed off set when Callaghan said he was perfectly happy with how he looks.
“It was weird because, you know, he realised that he was kind of losing control of the interview, so he first went for an ad hominem attack being like, ‘You’re a s***ty interviewer.’ And then at the end, he asked me, like, ‘Are you, are you secure with everything about yourself?’ His goal was to get me to profess some kind of personal insecurity so he could gain control of the narrative in the interview.”
Now, Callaghan says there was a lot more to that interview than what viewers saw, including that Clavicular (real name Braden Eric Peters) pretended he didn’t know Callaghan, even though he asked to be interviewed on Callaghan’s channel.
“He DM’d me out of nowhere and was like: ‘Yo, what up?’ And like, asked for my number. So he knew who I was. Even though he pretended, he’s like: ‘You’re from Channel 5, right? Channel 5, Fort Lauderdale. You guys are part of the mainstream media.’ … So he was just playing dumb. I’m sure there’s some pickup artist style code word for what he was doing, similar to negging.”
Ultimately, Callaghan seems to feel sorry for Clavicular, noting that Looksmaxxing has its roots in online incel culture.
“He was in lockdown during puberty, during which, in a moment of isolation, confusion, and hormonal rage, found on incel forums, PSL forums, found out about this look, pickup artist hate, slut hate, and looksmaxxing, which is the three tiers of the incel community,” Callaghan said.
On Melania Trump’s $1 Billion Lawsuit Threat
Callaghan said it felt “awesome” to hear about a threatened USD $1 billion lawsuit from US First Lady Melania Trump, following an interview that touched on the Trumps’ marriage and Jeffrey Epstein.
“So I interviewed Hunter Biden… and he basically insinuated in the podcast that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump through some modelling contract… So she sends him a legal demand letter saying ‘if you don’t get Andrew Callaghan to remove your interview from YouTube, I’m going to sue you for $1 billion and name Andrew Callaghan as a plaintiff’.
“It was epic. I’m like: Oh, my God, the First Lady wants to kind of sue me for a billion dollars? You know, I was just living in an RV four years prior.”
On His 2022 Cancellation & Accusers Asking for Money
“The initial accuser sent me a message eight minutes before [‘This Place Rules’, Callaghan’s HBO film] came out asking for a portion of my fat HBO check to assist with therapy. And from what I know now and what I’ve learned since then, that was trying to get me on the hook for more. So, it’s hard to want to take accountability when you know that that happened…”
Callaghan said that it was also in this moment that he realised how easy it is for people who have been cancelled to find community elsewhere – often in right-wing political circles.
“To be in that moment, within I think, a four-day period, you lose all of your support. You know, you get dropped from your agency, lose every sponsor, your best friends evaporate, your DMs on Instagram have, like, tens of thousands of messages, and half of them say, you know, ‘Kill yourself. You’re a piece of shit’,” he said.
“Infowars offered me a job a week later. That’s what people don’t understand about cancellation and cancel culture, is that it’s not the end of your career, it’s the beginning of a new one. If you double down and make yourself into a free speech warrior that was silenced by the machine and kind of enter that sphere, you can make double the money. I’m really happy that I didn’t take that route.”
On QAnon, January 6, and Right-Wing ‘Psyops’
Callaghan spends a lot of his time engaging with the fringes of online culture, such as believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, and many of the people who participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
“I personally believe that QAnon was a psyop to distract people from the reality of some of the new Epstein disclosure stuff that we’re seeing. … It wasn’t complete bulls**t, which makes you wonder why is that 20% truth being lumped in with flat Earth and lizards and chemtrails… to basically drown the entire thing in just unbelievable bulls**t so that you associate Epstein with flat earth. It worked pretty well.”
Callaghan also told Theroux that the wrong people were punished for the January 6 insurgency.
“The fact that you’re giving people that amount of time when they were encouraged to do what they did by the most powerful political party in the country… and no one’s being charged except for the individual soldiers on the front line….”
“Trump should’ve been charged for it. Not Dave from Nebraska who has no friends and has been smoking like 40% weed and listening to these fringe podcasts every day for six months straight… All third spaces that were already dwindling have gone away, and now he’s like, ‘What’s my purpose in life? To defeat the forces of evil…’ They were treated horribly, man, and it’s only made them double down.”
Rob Stott is the Editor in Chief at Man of Many, leading the editorial direction and content strategy for Australia’s largest independent men’s lifestyle publication.
With over 16 years of experience in digital publishing, Rob has spent his career at ...
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